1689. In consequence of his anti-Turkish
policy of forming an alliance first with Austria and then with Russia,
he was denounced to the Porte, deposed from his throne, brought under
arrest to Constantinople and imprisoned (1710) in the fortress of Yedi
Kuleh (Seven Towers). Here he was tortured by the Turks, who hoped thus
to discover the fortune of L3,000,000, which Constantine was alleged to
have amassed. He was beheaded with his four sons on the 26th of August
1714. His faithful friend Enake Vacarescu shared his fate. Constantine
Brancovan became, through his tragic death, the hero of Rumanian popular
ballads. His family founded and endowed the largest hospital in
Walachia, the so-called Spital Brancovanescu.

See O.G. Lecca, _Familiile Boeresti Romane_ (Bucharest, 1899), p. 90,
sqq. (M. G.)

BRAND, JOHN (1744-1806), English antiquary, was born on the 19th of
August 1744 at Washington, Durham, where his father was parish clerk.
His early years were spent at Newcastle-on-Tyne with his uncle, a
cordwainer, to whom he was apprentice in his fourteenth year. Showing
promise, however, at Newcastle grammar school, friends interested
themselves in him and assisted him to go to Oxford. It was not, however,
until his twenty-eighth year that he matriculated at Lincoln College,
but before this he had been ordained, holding in succession the curacies
of Bolam, Northumberland, of St Andrew's, Newcastle, and of Cramlington,
8 m. from the county town. He graduated in 1775 and two years later was
elected fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Having for a short time
been under-usher at the Newcastle grammar school, the duke of
Northumberland, a former patron, gave him in 1784 the rectory of the
combined parishes of St Mary-at-Hill and St Mary Hubbard, London.
Appointed secretary to the Society of Antiquaries in the same year, he
was annually re-elected until his death in 1806. He was buried in the
chancel of his church. His most important work is _Observations on
Popular Antiquities: including the whole of Mr Bourne's "Antiquitates
Vulgares," with addenda to every chapter of that work_. This was
published in London in 1777, and after Brand's death, a new edition
embodying the MSS. left by him, was published by Sir Henry Ellis in
1813. Brand also published a poem entitled: _On Illicit Love, written
among the ruins of Godstow Nunnery, near Oxford_ (1775, Newcastle); _The
History and Antiquities of Newcastle-upon-Tyne_ (2